This teardrop pendant-bottle that held a liquid pain-killer drug was a very popular apparel accessory of Chinese women. I am fortunate to have found it at Alan HAMILTON’s home. He collected Chinese stuff from the gold mining campsites and rivers near Arrowtown when he was young. He showed me a variety of objects, but I picked up this broken teardrop pendant-bottle, tucked away on his shelf. Before the arrival of the first Chinese woman in 1873, the pendant-bottle was likely to have been given to a man at the time he left home. The gold-plated name of the drug company Ma Pak Leung [馬百良] is vaguely apparent on the glass surface illuminating the faith of the giver. Mak Pak Leung was established in 1822 and is still in business today in Hong Kong and Canton. For the Chinese, the teardrop pendant-bottle is an ‘object of trust’ [信物] that a woman would only give away to her husband or someone she has an intimate relationship with, to remind her man who is going far away, of his promises to return home, to reunion with his family one day. Object of trust is thus a symbol or representation of the woman being there with him and her cares for the man. Physically apart but emotionally closely connected.

In the other photograph, I put the English oath (with Chinese phonetic translation) on top of a pair of woman's sandals (an ‘object of trust’). The two objects were likely to have belonged to two unrelated families. That was my creative improvisation at the Lakes District Museum & Gallery in Arrowtown. This virtual scene of ‘swearing’ to the sandal is my subjective belief that the man always had wanted to return home — a collective ideological thought of the then Chinese society.